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As voters look toward the 2012 congressional elections, anti-incumbent sentiment is running at or near record highs. Just 20% of voters say they would like to see most members of Congress reelected in the next congressional election. Two-thirds (67%) think most members of Congress should be replaced. This figure exceeds – by double digits – previous highs set in 1994, 2006 and 2010.

As is generally the case, voters are more positive about their own congressional representative than about Congress at large. Half (50%) of those polled say they would like to see their own representative reelected while 33% say their representative should not be reelected. Still, this figure is roughly equal to the level of anti-incumbent sentiment in 2010, when 58 incumbents lost reelection bids – the most since 1948.

Public discontent with Congress has reached record levels, and the implications for incumbents in next year’s elections could be stark, according to the the latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Dec. 7-11. Two-in-three voters say most members of Congress should be voted out of office in 2012 – the highest on record. And the number who say their own member should be replaced matches the all-time high recorded in 2010, when fully 58 members of Congress lost reelection bids – the most in any election since 1948.

Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who has served in the House since 1981, announced his retirement this week. Among Washington journalists, Frank is known as smart, accessible, and eager to disparage them. (As Hendrik Hertzberg wrote after the announcement, “Frank is frank. He does not bore.”) Here’s a list of some of his best …

It might have been “too much too soon,” a chastened Gov. John Kasich of Ohio admitted on Tuesday night, after his state’s voters overwhelmingly rejected his attempt to break public employee unions. He certainly was right about “too much,” an analysis that also applies to other examples of Republican overreach around the country that were kicked into the gutter: an anti-abortion amendment in Mississippi, a voting restriction in Maine, the radical anti-immigrant agenda of a politician in …

I confess to being driven insane this past month by the spectacle of television pundits professing to be baffled by the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Good grief. Isn’t the ability to read still a job requirement for a career in journalism? And as last week’s inane “What Do They Want?” meme morphs into this week’s craven “They Want Your Stuff” meme, I feel it’s time to explain something: Occupy Wall Street may not have laid out all of its demands in a perfectly cogent one-sentence bumper sticker for you, Mr. Pundit, but it knows precisely what it doesn’t want. It doesn’t want you.

For those of you not familiar with “Newspaper Op-Ed Writing 101,” our industry’s Bible of formulaic punditry, there is a technique called “Trick #19B” that goes like this:

1. Put a half-baked image or satirical “idea” in your topic sentence. It is best if the idea and/or the wording is not actually your own, but this isn’t absolutely necessary. A good example might be something like this: “Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

2. Sit back and admire the sentence. You wrote this!

3. Connect your idea to a current news event. You can do this by taking the wire-service writeup of that news event and sandwiching it between two of your “images.” For instance, the following sentence…

“In a nationally-televised address yesterday, Barack Obama announced a new …

Americans express mixed opinions about a possible independent Palestinian state, an issue that has so far drawn little attention from the press or the public. More favor (42%) than oppose (26%) the United States recognizing Palestine as an independent nation, while nearly a third (32%) express no opinion.

Though voters’ views of the ideologies of the political parties have shifted little since the summer of 2010, an increasing number see the Republican Party as very conservative, while slightly fewer see the Democratic Party as very liberal.

In 2010, somewhat more, on balance, viewed the Democratic Party as very liberal than said the GOP was very conservative (26% vs. 18%). Currently, nearly identical percentages view the Democratic Party as very liberal and the Republican Party as very conservative (22%, 23% respectively).

Only about one-in-ten Americans (11%) say they are basically content with the federal government, by far the lowest percentage saying so since the question was first asked in 1997. Similarly, public trust in government, which recovered slightly earlier this year, has plummeted again. In current recent survey by the Pew Resarch Center for the People & the Press, 80% say they trust the government to do what is right only some of the time or never. Just 19% say the government can be trusted ‘just about always’ or ‘most of the time’. When this question was first asked on the American National Election Study in 1958 nearly three-quarters (73%) of Americans said they always or mostly trusted the government to do what is right.

In a survey conducted after the conclusion of the debt ceiling negotiations, nearly three in ten (29%) of Americans judged the impact of Tea Party supporters as mostly negative compared with 22% who see their impact as mostly positive. At the beginning of the year, the balance of opinion was just the opposite: 27% said that Tea Party members in Congress would have a positive impact, while 18% expected a negative effect. The balance of opinion changed the most among political independents. In January, by a margin of 29% to 14% independents expected that Tea Party members would have a positive effect. Currently, about as many independents say Tea Party members in Congress are having a negative effect (28%) as a positive effect (24%).

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